Japan's mass bear cull fails to stem attacks despite killing 14,000 animals

Japan killed more than 14,000 bears in sixteen months. The culling began in April 2025, after a year that left thirteen people dead and more than 230 attacked—the deadliest period on record for human-bear conflict in the country. The government, facing unprecedented pressure, relaxed rules for shooting bears in populated areas and laid traps across the nation. By January 2026, roughly 12,000 Asiatic black bears and 2,000 brown bears were dead. Yet the killing has not stopped the attacks. Since April, six more people have been killed and at least 35 others mauled across nine prefectures, some near Tokyo itself.

The root cause lies not in bear numbers but in the forest itself. Climate change has devastated the foods bears depend on to survive. Beech nuts and acorns—the caloric foundation of their pre-hibernation diet—have failed across Japan's mountainous northern prefectures of Akita and Iwate. Mongolian oak trees are dying. Gray weevils have destroyed acorn crops. Japanese beech produces sparse seeds. Without these foods, bears descend into villages and towns, searching for anything edible. In Karuizawa, a resort town in Nagano prefecture just an hour from Tokyo by bullet train, bears move close during summer months, feeding on mulberries, ants, leaves, and cherry blossoms—all low in calories, all insufficient. The town's wildlife researchers have documented how bears, driven by hunger, venture into residential spaces with increasing desperation. The busiest tourist season coincides with peak bear activity, creating a collision between human leisure and animal survival.

Karuizawa has pioneered a different approach. Since the 1990s, Picchio, a small Japanese conservation group, has worked toward coexistence. When bears appear, staff respond with Karelian dogs—a breed trained to chase them away—or tranquilize and relocate them deep into forest. This year alone, Picchio captured nineteen bears and responded to more than 130 sightings, a twenty percent increase from the previous year. Yet the actual number of bear damage incidents has not risen. What changed is awareness. After news coverage of the attacks flooded national and international media, people became hypervigilant. Foreign governments, including the UK, issued travel warnings. Insurance companies began selling bear-attack coverage. Farmers installed animatronic wolves with glowing red eyes. One company marketed private bear shelters. The fear, in many cases, outpaced the actual danger.

The national government's response has been to eliminate bears at a scale unmatched in the modern world. From 2008 to 2018, Japan culled between 1,000 and 4,500 bears annually. In 2023-24, that number jumped to more than 9,000. Now, in a single sixteen-month period, the country has killed more than 14,000. For context, Canada, Russia, and the United States permit the legal hunting of less than ten percent of their respective brown and black bear populations—neither of which is considered endangered. Sweden killed about twenty percent of its brown bears in 2024. Slovenia approved a cull of one-fifth of its population. Japan's response dwarfs them all. The government has announced plans to kill another 8,800 bears this fiscal year.

Conservationists are alarmed. Asiatic black bears are classified as vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Fewer than 60,000 exist worldwide. Japan harbors an estimated 42,000—one of the species' last strongholds—though that figure may be an undercount. No comprehensive survey has been conducted since 2011. If the current cull continues, removing what could amount to a quarter of Japan's population, regional extinctions become possible, according to Yuko Muroya, chair of the Japan Bear and Forest Society. "A government strategy focused solely on reducing bear numbers will not solve the bear problem until bears themselves are driven to extinction," she said. The irony is sharp: Japan has spent decades successfully restoring Asiatic black bears to their former range on Honshu. Since the 1970s, as rural populations fled to cities and farmland reverted to woodland, bears have recolonized thousands of kilometers of habitat. This is a conservation success story colliding with a human crisis.

Yet the science on mass culling is clear. Research from Canada and the United States shows that broad-based hunting fails to reduce conflicts long-term, especially compared with targeted removal of individual problem bears. North American wildlife managers have moved away from this approach. "From our perspective in North America, it comes across as very old school," said Geoff York, an American bear biologist. "But it's also what we did back in the day. And we have kind of been there, done that, and realised it didn't work." Alternatives exist: temporary feeding programs during bad food years to keep bears in the mountains; management of abandoned orchards and fallow farmland to make them less attractive; bear-proof garbage systems; and targeted removal of individual animals that repeatedly attack. In November 2025, Japan's environment ministry released a protection plan that includes some of these measures—chasing bears away, installing fences, removing fruit trees near homes, training response exercises. The ministry also hired bear management officers for regional offices in eastern Japan. But these efforts remain marginal compared to the scale of culling.

In Karuizawa, where no one has been attacked since 2015, residents have grown more fearful despite the town's success. The government now requires more captured bears to be killed rather than relocated. Hiroo Tamatani, leader of Picchio's bear team, says the shift reflects a hardening political stance. Yet the evidence from his own town suggests another path is possible. Kumamori, the conservation society, plants nut-bearing trees to encourage bears to remain in forests. Muroya calls for learning from ancestors who maintained separation between people and bears, and from other countries that have moved beyond culling-only policies. "We can either learn to live with the bears we share habitat with, or we can remove them," York said. "I hope we are moving towards tolerance." Japan's government has chosen the opposite direction, at least for now. Whether that choice will ultimately protect people or simply drive a vulnerable species toward extinction remains an open question—one that will take years to answer.